History of iPhone

The iPhone is a very attractive multimedia and internet enabled mobile device. If you were to describe the iPhone in simple words, you can say it is a combination of an iPod and a mobile phone. Since the iPhone is creating history with its launch, let’s first look at the history of – The iPhone.

The whole idea of the iPhone came with Steve Jobs trying to play around with the touch screen concept. He wanted this concept to be inbuilt into a mobile phone. Looking at it from that aspect, the engineers in Apple started working on the iPhone. The initial collaboration was between Apple and AT&T (previously known as Cingular Wireless) with an estimate development cost of $150 million. During the design phase the iPhone was code named “Purple 2”.

The name iPhone was first trademarked by a company called Infogear in 1999. In fact, in 1998 Infogear had launched a phone with an integrated web browser under the name iPhone. Since then the name iPhone has been abandoned. In 2000, Cisco bought Infogear including the iPhone trademark. On Dec18, 2006 they launched a set of VoIP sets in the name iPhone. When Apple first announced the launch of the iPhone, Cisco sued them for infringement of their trademark. The two companies had not reached a settlement, but by 20 Feb, 2007 both the companies reached an agreement and decided that both the companies could use the iPhone trademark.

Apple announced that they would launch their new mobile phone called the iPhone on Jan 9, 2007. It was launched in the US on June 29, 2007. It was declared as the Invention of the Year 2007 by Times Magazine. The initial price tag was $499 for the 4GB and $599 for the premium edition with 8GB. On July 11, 2008 Apple released its second set of iPhones called the iPhone 3G. The iPhone 3G starts from $199.

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Filed Under: iPhone